After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists looking for fossilized human bones have established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe. Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown archaic species of human, a cousin of the Neanderthals, may have lingered in Africa until perhaps 25,000 years ago, coexisting with the modern humans and on occasion interbreeding with them.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

So what we infer is this: Modern humans spread out of Africa very late in the Pleistocene— as recently as 60,000 to 50,000 years ago. One founding population spread east, reaching Australia by 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. Another remained in southwestern Asia or India, but after ~5000 to 10,000 years, its descendant populations dramatically expanded their range, colonizing lands as far removed from one another as northern Africa, temperate Europe, and the Russian Plain. They also reached southern Siberia by 45,000 years ago (17) and arctic Siberia by 30,000 years ago(18), but the retelling of these and other events in the missing years of modern human evolution must await new fossil and archaeologicaldiscoveries as well as continued DNA sampling of the world’s living populations.